In recent years the matter has come up with a number of historically significant local churches, including Quincy’s landmark Church of the Presidents.

Jeff Stevens, a member of the Unitarian Church in Middleboro, and originally made the request for taxpayer funding to restore the 123-year-old organ.

“We have an historic instrument, deemed historic by the historical commission,” Stevens said. The restoration met the historic preservation guidelines and was a “perfectly valid use” of taxpayer’s funds, he said.

The state Community Preservation Coalition approves using taxpayers’ money to preserve historic religious objects and institutions if the project has a secular purpose.

But constitutional law experts disagree.

“It’s unconstitutional; it violates the federal constitution,” said Andrew Seidel, an attorney with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. “This is a new violation, one that has just started cropping up. We're working on it.”

Sarah Wunsch, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said the use of community funds to restore the organ may be a problem. Typically the funds are used to restore exteriors of old churches, not, she said, “integral objects in a religious service.”

Edd Doerr is a bit more blunt: “If the church can't afford to repair the organ, that's tough.”

Doerr, chief executive officer of Americans for Religious Liberty, a national nonprofit organization based in Maryland, sees this request as a Constitutional violation.

The Unitarians’ organ is the latest in a number of restoration projects in the area to be funded with CPA money. Plymouth used some of its funds to restore a Paul Revere bell that hangs in the bell tower of First Parish Church.

Page 2 of 2 - Braintree’s town council this year used $39,500 to construct a John Adams Memorial Plaza in front of the First Congregational Church, which was started on the same site in 1707. In 2012, $80,000 of Quincy’s community preservation funds plus another $40,000 from the city went toward a $700,000 renovation of the bell and bell tower of the Church of the Presidents. The church owns the tower, but because the bell once signaled both public and church meetings, the city owns the bell.

Kingston used $72,000 to rehabilitate the exterior of the historic First Congregational Church.

But the status of the Middleboro church’s organ is less clear.

“I think it's terrible ... Frankly the members of the church should be the ones to maintain it, or take it out and sell it,” said Andrew D. Epstein, a lawyer with the Boston firm of Barker, Epstein & Loscocco of the Middleboro organ repair.

Epstein questioned the town’s adherence to separation of church and state last year when he saw a large brick cross, erected 50 years ago by the Kiwanis Club on Route 28 in town.. Across the top of the cross is the word, “WORSHIP.”

He and others contented that the decision by Middleboro town meeting to transfer ownership of land where the 7-foot cross stands into private hands was an effort to skirt the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The religious symbol should be removed from public land, he said.

Town meeting voted overwhelmingly to try to protect the brick cross and avoid a lawsuit by turning over its rights to the land. The issue is not yet settled.

Stevens, who drew the ire of town meeting when he opposed transferring the cross site, is now also embroiled in the organ repair controversy.

“I didn’t know we couldn’t do it; none of us knew it was a constitutional problem,” said selectmen Chairman Stephen J. McKinnon said of current flap around funding the church organ. The approval didn’t get much attention in April because officials were focused on balancing the budget, he said.

McKinnon says he will direct the local Community Preservation Committee to withhold granting the funds to the Unitarian Church until the matter can be reviewed by an a lawyer. He is also prepared to gather signatures for a warrant article in the spring to take back the money if it doesn’t pass constitutional muster, he said.